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How to Improve SEO for Images

People often overlook the importance of filenames when it comes to improving the SEO of their website and their WordPress themes. There are two simple things that everyone should be doing.

1. Make filenames machine & human readable

No one is going to be searching for IMG-938398734.jpg, but they might be searching for pictures of cats playing with yarn and could come across your website if your file was named cat-playing-with-yarn.jpg. Having clear descriptive filenames is one of the easiest ways to improve your search visibility.

2. Utilize alternate text

Before inserting your image, be sure to fill out the alternate text field. It is arguably the most important factor that affects the SEO of your images. For more specifics on how to best use the alt attribute, check out this article.

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Thad is the founder of Theme.Works and Graph Paper Press. Previously, he produced online multimedia and documentary projects for USA Today including the inauguration of President Barack Obama and many others. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Abby.

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8 thoughts on “How to Improve SEO for Images”

I would like to see an article with information about best practices for setting up yoast seo or similar plugin. Specifically, what is the best method for setting up sell media collections and individual images with sitemaps. It would be nice to know how google wants to see our sellable collections organzied on a sitemap and how we should tell google to index them.

This list has been crafted considering the factors that directly influence the SEO, like page speed, social shares, optimization… Google analytics by Yoast is just a plugin which allows you to track clicks on individual links and track your overall website visitors im using two SEO plugins on my site brightverge.com one is Yoast and other is easy seo wp plugin both are working excellent… But it’s just an analytic tool and noting more. You said WP supercache works better on your server than w3 total cache, I am eager to know your server’s configuration.,